Shaping Your Speech

http://www.livescience.com/25277-teen-speech-improves-college.html

College Shapes Up Your Speech

This article is about how this generation of students can shape up their speech from the language they are used to speaking with technology and small talk within their town to using proper English when they attend a large university or a private university. Kids today are used to speaking in their text-speaking language using words such as like, and not saying the g at the end of running. Instead they say "runnin" and leave out the g. In a study done by Suzanne Evans Wagner she followed the language trends of 16-19 year old female teens in Philadelphia. The girls started out talking like they would around their friends with their text-speaking language. As some went on to college their language had started to improve and they had started to speak the non-standard English language. It seems as if people want to stay local and within their community such as community colleges or working inside their town, that their language doesn't seem to improve, but only to stay the same as they hear the others around them and sound similar to them. When kids go away to larger universities and are surrounded around more educated students they adapt to the language that they use around them which is more of a proper English that they have learned from growing up. People who stay in their town do not have any social incentives to change the way the speak, as the people who go away to college and want to broaden their horizons, they seem to change the way the speak with the people they surround themselves with. The article simply explains how your surroundings and your openness to learning can change the way you think and speak. Whether its speaking more proper or worse, you adapt to the environment around you. An article related to the way some kids speak today for a better understanding is http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-483511/I-h8-txt-msgs-How-texting-wrecking-language.html